UUCP

In 1976, Mike Lesk was working on a practical problem at Bell Labs. ARPANET already existed, but access remained the privilege of a restricted circle: in January of that year, only 63 hosts were connected to it. For UNIX users scattered across the United States, exchanging files or executing remote commands was an uphill battle. Lesk designed UNIX-to-UNIX Copy Protocol (UUCP), a pragmatic solution that transformed ordinary telephone lines into digital arteries.

The first version of UUCP was integrated into UNIX in February 1978. The protocol operated on 300-baud connections, a speed that seems trivial but represented notable progress. A few months later, in October, the Seventh Edition of UNIX included a revised version of the protocol. This time Lesk partnered with Dave Nowitz, with help from Greg Chesson, to correct the initial system’s teething problems.

In late 1979 at the University of North Carolina, Steve Bellovin, a student seeking to master the system’s intricacies, developed a modest news distribution program. Meanwhile, Tom Truscott and Bellovin experimented with a UUCP connection between UNC and Duke University. From this experimentation emerged an idea that would transform UUCP usage: why not distribute information to other sites using Duke as a hub? Remote sites reimbursed Duke for telephone costs, a rudimentary but effective system.

In early 1980, the network had three participants: UNC, Duke University, and Duke Medical Center’s physiology department. Jim Ellis presented the concept at a USENIX meeting in Boulder in January. The reception was favorable. Steve Daniels produced an implementation of the software called A News, distributed on the summer 1980 USENIX tape in Newark. The network expanded to 15 sites.

Armando Stettner and Bill Shannon, working at Digital Equipment Corporation, proposed an attractive deal to the University of California at Berkeley: they would cover Berkeley’s connection costs in exchange for network access via their decvax machine, located in New Hampshire. Stettner didn’t stop there and financed the first international connections to Europe, Japan, and Australia.

The network was named Usenet, in homage to USENIX. Growth exceeded all predictions: within a year, more than 100 sites were exchanging approximately 25 articles daily. This expansion revealed the initial system’s weaknesses. Mark Horton, a student at Berkeley, partnered with Matt Glickman, then a high school student, to completely rewrite A News. Their creation, B News, appeared in 1981. Horton continued to refine his work until 1984, before passing the torch to Rick Adams from the Center for Seismic Studies.

In June 1984, a geographic map of USENET revealed the phenomenon’s scope. Connections now extended to Australia, Hawaii, Canada, and Europe. Version 2.11 of B News, released in 1986, incorporated contributions from Rick Adams, Spencer Thomas, Ray Essick, and Rob Kolstad. Although new versions appeared until 1994, the system showed its limitations as early as 1989.

The NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol), published in February 1986 by Brian Kantor and Phil Lapsley, heralded a new era. A year later, Geoff Collyer and Henry Spencer from the University of Toronto launched C News, a more efficient alternative that definitively buried the old systems.

The financial question obsessed network actors. Lauren Weinstein presented the Stargate project at the 1984 summer USENIX conference, a bold proposal to use unused portions of the television video signal to transport ASCII data at 65 kbps. Despite support from several companies and successful tests, the project bogged down and was eventually abandoned.

Facing the inadequacies of existing commercial networks, Rick Adams proposed to USENIX in 1985 the creation of a central site accessible via Tymnet. UUNET was born in 1987 with an initial budget of $35,000. The service met a real need: many people lost their email and Usenet access when changing employers. Success exceeded expectations. Installed on a 16-processor Sequent B21 computer, UUNET had more than 50 subscribers by June 1987 and several thousand five years later.

UUNET participated in the creation of the Commercial Internet Exchange Association in 1991. The following year, the company co-founded MAE-East with Metropolitan Fiber Systems, the world’s largest Internet exchange point for a time. The IPO occurred in May 1995, consecrating the concept’s commercial success.

UUCP’s success stemmed from its innovative technical characteristics. The system operated asynchronously, with task queuing. Transmissions occurred in the background, accommodating the constraints of often-busy telephone lines. The protocol required no operating system modifications and adapted equally well to direct connections and modems.

Security aspects were not neglected. Each site configured files and commands accessible to remote systems. Authentication relied on passwords, and some sites used automatic callback to verify caller identity. Sequence counters could be activated to counter identity spoofing attempts.

UUCP persisted into the 1990s, particularly in situations where permanent Internet connection was inaccessible or too expensive. On slow serial lines, it proved more efficient than TCP/IP. Its batch architecture was perfectly suited to email and Usenet news transport.

UUCP’s legacy spans decades. Email address syntax (user@host) owes its existence to it, as do certain email routing mechanisms. The protocol demonstrated that it was possible to build large-scale decentralized computer networks relying on existing telecommunications infrastructure. Its influence is found in the subsequent development of the Internet and asynchronous communication technologies.